The Great Hoodie Debacle

Several months ago now you all ordered your school hoodies and have been wondering what’s been taking us so long. We have good news for you, but we also figured you’d like answers, so we hope this post will answer your questions.

First, if you don’t care about the reasons: the hoodies are here, and you can collect them starting this Wednesday (26/04/2017) in the morning (08:00-08:45) and at break (11:10-11:30). We’ll be here all week from Wednesday onward, and all of next week too.

Now, the answers.

We initially collected your money and orders the first week of January, and since we got a lot (and I mean a lot) of orders, it took us a little while to gather up and tabulate all your information. We’re dealing with large sums of money here, and a mistake would not result in very pleasant things. Then we deposited all the money in our account, kept with the school.

And here is when the trouble starts.

Since our account is managed by the school accountants, we need to go through them for every transaction. We found out our account cannot do online payments (which apparently hasn’t been a problem in previous years), and so we couldn’t pay for the hoodies directly. We tried finding workarounds with them, however it took them a while to respond to each of our queries, and it took us quite some time to truly understand the situation.

Now, all credit to them, we are working with them to find an alternative solution for next year’s Committee, where we have much more direct control of our account, which should make sure this doesn’t happen again. However, this was still disappointing.

We realised that the school could make a transaction to CoSup, and they could pay the hoodie suppliers directly, and we started to act on this. The CoSup accountants are also incredibly busy (especially with the whole Europarty saga), so this also took some time, however eventually the money came through. (Kudos to our supplier too; once they received the transaction, the hoodies were printed and shipped in record time.)

We understand that this was unacceptably long. All your messages and questions about them showed us how hard this was, not to mention the fact that many of us had also bought the hoodies and were stuck waiting. We’re sorry about this. As mentioned above, we’re already taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Next year we’ll have a different account structure, so I shouldn’t have to write this post again. Still, we’re sorry we took so long.

The hoodies are finally here; you can get them this week. If you have any more questions about this, feel free to leave a comment below this post. Thank you for your trust.